2A: Deflection

The phone began to ring. Darnby went out into the hall. It was just a wrong number. He headed back to the living room. Just as he was closing the door, the phone rang again. The same voice asked for Reg. Darnby provided his local code and the number. The man on the other end of the line confirmed that he wanted that number and read out an address in Liverpool. That was when they discovered that he had been dialling 051 for the Liverpool area but getting connected somehow to the 061 Manchester area.
   Darnby left him to sort the problem out with the phone company and went back to his magazine and the trials and tribulations of the much delayed Space Shuttle.
   Later, he found himself unable to shake off the impression that he had come across something interesting, something worth trying out because it wouldn't cost him anything. But the idea had drifted too far away for him to retrieve.

END of this route through the story.

In Conclusion

I wrote this short story in September of 1980, before the computer technology needed to create a hypertext story was available to the home user.

Fifteen years later, in September of 1995, there were much fancier hypertext programs on the market than the one which I wrote [using QBasic 4.5, for anyone interested in that sort of thing] to display the hypertext version of the story, but what really counts is the content of the story, not how it looks, and the author chosing to make the effort to go all the way with his vision.

The story is featured in the second volume of my collected short stories [first edition 1997] and this HTML version was created in January, 2000.

This is the end.

Use the navigation panel on the left to explore another route or return to the front page by closing this window. The BACK button will not take you back to the front page as this is a separate window.

Created for Romiley Literary Circle by Henry T. Smith Productions, 10 SK6 4EG, G.B.
sole © Philip Turner, 1980.